פרוייקט היזמים - כתבה מס.7 - Sportingo

Sportingo is a sport media company. We provide two services:

• Quality UGC about sports from fans around the world.
• A guide for watching sport media.

Our site has been live for over a year and we have 2,000 registered writers and about 800,000 unique visitors a month.
Let’s start by summarizing 2007, we had a formal launch of our service, raised money, acquired caughtoffside.com, opened a London office, signed some key partners and learned a lot about a changing market place.
As with any new venture we had several assumptions when we started, some worked others did not and required us to adjust our thinking.

We found out that fans are not very good as sport reports. The reason a fan will spend time writing is because they want to get dialog going. Very few fans are interested in just covering the news. Once we realized this we moved away from getting fans generating news and instead giving them a way to voice their opinion the amount of interaction on the site grow considerably. A great example is an article by Jamie Karwar about Steven Gerrard http://www.sportingo.com/football/a5851_liverpools-steven-gerrard-not-worldclass . Jamie is a Liverpool fan whose views tend to be very different then those of other Liverpool fans and generate a lot of controversy. I am amazed by his willingness to put his views out there even with so much negative feedback from other fans. Yet this is part of the power that the Internet allows fans. Instead of just talking with your mates, or at best people at the local pub. You can now reach 10,000 fans that will argue the point with you. As we see it Sportingo is a way to amplify and share these conversations all around the world.

Another assumption we had which did not materialize yet was around the consumption of live sports over the web. A year ago the industry was talking about how 2007 is going to be the year in which people start watching live streaming on the web. At the end of the year we found at the numbers are much smaller then expected and almost all online media consumption is for clips. It will take much longer for the live steaming market to evolve due to a combination of problems with the user experience, technology and rights. The Sportingo media guide now has to adjust to meet today’s market needs while planning for a future that will take longer to mature.

This is one of the most important lessons I can share with the rest of the community. Even when you use the best data available to make your decision you will still find that with new markets hitting the right timing is very difficult to predict. It is important to be able to face the hard truth at times and adjust your product instead of just hoping that everyone else is wrong and the market is just around the corner.

The other insight from our first year is that everything from fund raising, recruiting, development will take longer then you expect. Take as much money as you can from investors, constantly look at the real numbers in the market and be ready to adjust if your assumptions are not proving themselves.

Figure out what you are about, and which opportunities you have to pass then make some bets and do you best to work through the problems.